Here is the final draft of our music video, and we are very proud of the final result!

Here is what we did today, just a little video now that were coming towards the end of making our music video. We were literally just adding the finishing touches and experimenting with transitions.

In today's lesson unfortunately Beste wasn't here however I decided to make a few tweaks here and there on our music video. When watching it back on You Tube me and Beste noticed a sound of us laughing at South end which was heard on the shot of me singing into the microphone. However when I looked back on iMovie there was no detached audio. I then discovered that the clip hadn't been muted, and so i muted it, although i am still confused because the sound which we heard was not the sound from the actual clip being shown. It has however fixed the problem which is whats important.

I then went through and adjusted specific shots to make sure that they were all framed more professionally. For example in one of the snow shots at 2:00 when we are running around the tree, the tree was more positioned to the right, so I cropped it using the cropping and rotation tool so that we would be more central.

I also added in a transition at the end, so that it would fade out to black rather than just cutting off. It makes it flow nicely rather than just finishing abruptly. I also adjusted the title of our song at the beginning as i felt it faded out too quickly. It was difficult to get it right as there isn't a separate option to fade in and out, only the option fade in/out, so I had to find a way to make it longer and continue fading out into our animation.

I watched our music video over and over and noted down all the little things I could improve. I noticed that some of the lip syncing was slightly out and so I tried to adjust it making it fit in time with the music. Hopefully it is now all on time. I also noticed that one of the panning shots of Beste crouched down by the door didn't look right. I therefore swapped the shot with clip which I felt was framed better. This is seen at 1:46, and compared to what it was before I think it looks much better, hopefully Beste will agree.

Today me and Beste spent most of our day editing piecing together all our remaining footage. We decided that we wanted the ending to be split into two sections. The first section goes with the lyrics 'this is the potential break up song' where we included shots which suggested the breakup, for example the cake smashing (symbolising the anger and hurt), the birds flying away (symbolising freedom), a shot where i'm staring at the clocks through the barriers on the steps (the barriers symbolising the feel of being trapped) etc. For the second section the lyrics say 'this is the potential makeup song' where we inserted lots of shots of us having fun, we also reversed some of the clips for example the one where a snowball distroys the word 'love'. This looked quite effective and we felt the idea behind it worked really well. We both really like the idea that our music video uses enigma codes, it is an open text, open to interpretation. The audience do not know whether they do breakup or whether they don't.

In the afternoon, although we had practically finished I decided to make a few adjustments and tweeks here and there. I turned the contrast up on some of the clips in order to bring out and enhance the colours. I also used the cropping and rotation tool to crop certain clips in order to frame the shot more professionally. I also inserted a few more quick shots to make sure that the clips change on the beat of the music. I also added in the title of our song to our opening shot. We still need to make a few adjustments on this however i feel that we had a very productive day and I know that we are very happy with our result. We are very nearly finished!

Here is our sixth draft, our first final draft..

Today me and Beste spent the morning editing our music video footage. We managed to piece everything together fitting it in time with the music. Watching it back I have noticed that the lip syncing needs adjusting in some places however here is our fifth draft showing what we managed to do today. We also edited the bridge section in the song which we are really happy with, although we would like to get some feedback from the class and our teacher to see whether we can make improvements.

Today me and Beste spent the whole day editing our footage. We are so happy with what we've done so far, we had lots of different shots to work with which made it a lot easier. We have decided to stick with our original plan of using one location per chorus in order to show the passing of time through the seasons. We edited in all of our Southend footage which is seen in the first chorus. We've created freeze frames for some of our establishing shots, for example we use one when showing the fairground as we wanted it to be a still shot. We were also really pleased with how we timed certain shots to fit with the music, for example the panning shot of Beste playing on the arcade machine, as she runs her hands over the buttons, we hear the drums play in the song. When showing some of our friends they pointed this bit out as a particular favourite.

Here is our fourth draft, we have now finished the Southend section although we may want to tweek a few bits. The rest of the footage after this is not yet in time with the song however we are planning to meet on wednesday to continue editing!

On Monday me and Beste made our way down to Southend. Firstly we spent the morning uploading all our previous footage and we then headed into town to buy our balloons.

When we finally arrived in Southend, we put on our wellies and set up all the equipment on the beach, witht he peer and sea in the background. We decided to begin with filming the balloon shots in order to get them out of the way. We bought 8 ballons so that we could at least do two takes, releasing 4 each time. The first time we did it we set up the camera and released the balloons. The second time, we filmed the balloons going up into the sky, these shots will be played on the lyrics 'don't let me go, coz without me you know your lost..'. We also did some other shots for example a long shot of us running along the beach with balloons as well as some shots of us lip syncing the chorus.

We then moved on to film my verse, the third verse 'we got along'. For this we used my bubble machine, as we felt that they would look pretty floating around me whilst I sang sitting on the sand. We then went off and began getting as many different shots as possible, splashing in the sea, some stop animation shots writing in the sand, the heart being washed away by the sea, shots of us looking out at the sea, panning shots of the funfair (even though it was sadly closed) and in the arcades, and also on the peer with a sunset background, which looks really effective as there is no one else around. We also found a large fountain area which we took advantage of and got some quite fun footage, although we did get fairly soaked!

We are both really excited to spend the rest of our time editing now that we have all our footage.

Today me and Beste spent the whole day filming. We haven't yet managed to get down to Southend however we have set aside Monday for my parents to take us down there. We hopefully managed to film everything else in which we needed to, making the most out of our day. I set up some of my dads music equipment so that we could film the bridge in our song. I spent quite some time practising lip syncing this part as it is sung very quickly! We tried our best to get a number of different shot types, for example a close up of the microphones and the mixers. We then moved on to film the third and fourth verses of our song. We had to improvise my verse as we had previously planned to film it in the forest, however we filmed outside in the snow with trees already so we decided to scrap that idea and make the most out of what we had at my house. Luckily I have a balcony and so I suggested that it would be nice to get some shots of me up there staring out into the distance. Whilst I was up there I noticed that the sky looked really pretty, with the clouds reflecting pink and orange. Beste passed me up the camera and I managed to get a nice shot, slowly zooming into the pastel coloured sky, perhaps an ending to our song. It was a very long day of filming, we started at around 12 and finished at roughly 7, however we feel it was a very productive day, and we are excited to start editing the new footage!

In yesterday's lesson Beste and I continued editing our footage together and also decided to go outside and get one more shot. Luckily we still had snow outside and were able to get this one shot with no problem. I made the word LOVE out of twigs in the snow while Beste filmed. I then dropped snow on top of the word which destroyed it. We decided to do this as the shot before is of me throwing a snowball towards the camera. Now it looks like it was the snow ball I threw which destroyed the word.

Here is our third draft with this small change..

Here is the footage which we managed to capture in the snow. We've recently spent our lessons selecting the bits we want to include in our music video and have edited this footage on imovie. We currently do not have all of our footage however we are planning on inserting different shot at different locations in between the snow footage, making it more choppy and interesting to watch rather than having one location after the other. This is our second draft showing you what we have got up to so far..

Today me and Beste spent the day filming. We filmed our petal location and also took the camera out in the snow to get some footage for our chorus. I set the camera up and sprinkled petals in Beste's hair, we were really happy that we decided to get real dried petals rather than using material ones as we felt they looked more professional. When filming Beste, I decided to use a number of different camera angles such as a close up of her hand scrunching up the petals, so that when editing we could chop and change to different shots on the beat of the music making it more interesting to watch. We then made our way outside to get some more footage making the most out of the snow. We both wore our fur coats so that we would match but also because they are quite quirky and bold. We managed to set up the camera on the tripod so that we could both be in it. At some points I filmed Beste and at other times we swapped and she filmed me. We will be uploading what we have done so far very soon..

Today me and beste have been working very hard on our music video. We managed to edit some footage on imovie for the opening of our music video. We also managed to film some footage of the phone which we see when the lyrics say 'for you to call back'. We wanted to make this shot a bit more interesting and so we decided to zoom out beginning the shot very close on the phone creating a blurry effect which was intentional.

We have also managed to schedule one more days to film and also take pictures for our digipaks. We are hoping to do this on Friday the 13th. Unlucky for some hopefully not us!

Here is a small video put together showing you our work..

Monday was a very long day of preperation and filming. We spent the morning shopping for all our props such as the clocks, a birthday cake, glitter, bubbles, petals etc. We then went back to my house to begin filming. We started off with the introduction to our music video. We tried a couple of different ideas for this, suchas having bubbles float and then pop on our logo but then I suggested that we should try covering our logo in glitter then blowing it away left to reveal our name..'The Capulets'. We really liked the outcome of this one inparticular. We used silver, pink and purple glitter as we wanted to stick to our girly bright colour scheme. I then blew the glitter away using a hairdryer which worked effectively and we tried this a couple of times just in case we found something wrong with it when editing. This took us a while to set up as we discovered a number of problems. We couldn't adjust the camera to fit the logo onto the screen without it cutting bits off so I printed a smaller copy which allowed us to work around this problem.

After spending lots of time cleaning up the glitter we moved onto another rather messy piece of footage where we have a shot of a birthday cake smashing. This goes with the lyrics 'Except for the fact it was my birthday', where she is angry that her boyfriend has forgotten her birthday. We went to a number of shops to try and find a suitable cake, with lots of cream so that it could splatter, however when we finally found one it was the last left. This meant that we could do one one take, and so there was quite abit of pressure to get it right the first time round. Luckily after carefully adjusting the camera and positioning ourselves correctly, Beste pressed record and I dropped the cake!

Here is before picture of the cake..

And here it is after..



We then moved on to the clock scene where we are introduced to the first artist, in this case me. Originally we wanted to hang the clocks on the wall however the wall in which we had planned to do this was not wide enough to fit me and the clocks in the shot. We still wanted to keep the idea so we tried to think of other places we could do this for example lying on the floor with the clocks surrounding me however we already have an over head shot when we use our petal location. We then put the clocks on the stairs instead as we felt this was quite a funky idea. We tried a variety of different shots including a low-angle shot which has the camera looking up at the subject, who then appears important, powerful, or domineering, exactly the effect we were hoping for.

Here are some pictures showing you my costume and our location taken during filming..

Here is our practice stop animation video we made in order to prepare for the final one. We will make this for the introduction of our song.

We wanted to make the most of the half term and take advantage of Halloween. Here is some footage we captured, as we want to perhaps use some of the clips for our real music video. Here is a little video we put together showing all the best bits..